SCADA Buying Guide

There are many concerns for buyer when looking for a SCADA. Here’s the SCADA buying guide with the top 10 considerations that you should aware:

It’s a real web SCADA and not traditional SCADA. It should allows you to view the mimic without needing you to download, preinstall, deploy some thick client. The world is transforming into web, cloud and IoT. You don’t want to buy something that will be soon obsolete.

Not just web SCADA, but lean & fast web SCADA that will work even when your network is congested. Furthermore, the web SCADA should equipped with Internet Gateway so you can access your browser even with dynamic IP. Otherwise, it will become hidden cost to you to buy high-end machine and network facility, let alone may require you to upgrade your broadband plan in order to achieve something essential.

The web SCADA shall be designed with high security in mind, it must support different role (restriction) of access for different sign-in location. It must be using SSL encryption technology for data transmission, supports HTTPS when you want to upgrade. It’s secure and has been actively patching vulnerabilities, and have been actively collaborate with security researchers and organizations. You don’t want to put your asset at stake.

It’s fully functional and equipped with built-in drivers. Using OPC means you will have additional cost incurred and slow performance. Apart from that, you will have simpler configuration, installation and hence maintenance.

The system opt for open programming language like JavaScript language. This mean you can get anyone to help maintaining the logic quickly, instead of spending time learning the proprietary language.

The alarm, historian and report database are ordinary relational database that can be connect to ODBC database. This is important so any database admin could integrate the SCADA database to your enterprise system, or vise versa.

The mimic screen is scalable and opt for open technologies, particularly SVG. Non proprietary is critical so you can port your existing drawing into the mimic, without additional work. And you can pinch to zoom into your mimic in case you have a small screen on phone.

The front-end must be responsive to your device screen. And the mimic is scalable and auto-fit into any resolution of display. Without this feature, you will have to pay a very expensive service fee to get your engineer to your site, just to redraw all images to fit into another monitor.

The SCADA is licensed based on software key, so you have the flexibility to put your system into cloud, or conveniently in virtual machine within your premises. Traditionally designed SCADA would require you to use dongle or hardware key. These traditional design mentality never consider today’s facility and doomed to move forward.

Some SCADAs claimed to support unlimited I/O tags with unlimited clients, this is very well mean the SCADA hasn’t gone through a stress test to know its own limit. A well designed and tested SCADA could tell you what’s the limit with recommended resource specification, and advise you when and how to scale up by adding hardware and network resources.

These are the top 10 reasons shared by our customers why they choose Ecava IGX for the past 10 years! What’s your additional reason to add into this SCADA buying guide? Download a copy and get started for free now!